Paying bills, for many individuals and organizations, is a significant inconvenience and source of stress. Most people spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to keep track of bills, payment amounts and/or due dates, not to mention the inconvenience of writing and mailing checks. Moreover, if a payment is overlooked or forgotten, that oversight can have a significant negative affect on an individual's (or organization's) credit rating, and/or can result in the interruption of an important service, repossession of a vehicle, etc. Moreover, the payment of bills results in non-trivial time and expense in many cases (due to, for example, the cost of envelopes, postage, penalties for late payments, etc.).
Some banks and other financial institutions have attempted to address this problem by providing online bill payment services for accountholders. These services, while perhaps avoiding some of the inconvenience of bill payment, do not address all of the problems with bill payment. For instance, with some banks payments generally must be scheduled individually by the accountholder, raising the same issues of possible missed payments, inconvenience in tracking amounts due and/or due dates, etc. Moreover, such online bill payment services generally are unavailable to those who do not hold an account at a bank offering such services.
Hence, there is a need for more robust bill payment services.